IdeaFestival friend, guest blogger and Founder of We Blog the World Renee Blodgett graciously contributed this post about her experiences in South Africa in high school, as well as in subsequent trips back to what she describes as a country almost her own. The IdeaFestival thanks her for permitting us to reprint her remembrances of South African and of the life and work of Nelson Mandela.
As I reflect on Mandela’s impact and his important life work, I began thinking of all the talks I have heard him give including a dramatic one in person in the 1990s, and zeroed in my own South African story, one which he influenced by his actions, his courage, his resilience and his solitude. He changed how I absorbed not just culture, politics and history, but how I viewed humanity and the world.
My story goes deep. Endure me on an important life journey for a moment, starting in a pre-Mandela world.
Apartheid was still very much in place when I lived in South Africa as a foreign exchange student in 1984, two years before the country’s declared State-of-Emergency.
Being white, I was placed with a well-off English speaking white family in a ritzy Johannesburg suburb and sent to a prestigious white school. In this bubbled existence, I was meant to be protected from the waging cultural war that was brewing under the surface. We wore uniforms and lived colonial lives, with two tea breaks a day at school, private tennis lessons and trips to the stables for horseback riding. And, it was oh so very proper. Girls hung out with girls, and boys hung out with boys even at co-ed schools.
Read the rest of the story at We Blog the World, and be sure to follow us on Twitter @weblogtheworld!
Renee Blodgett